A sculptor by training, since the 1990s, Deimantas Narkevičius has developed a body of work based on narration by means of film and video. He explores the history of his country, Lithuania, through his works, taking his private, family surroundings as his starting point. He is interested in post-war society in the Soviet block, and regards history as a living material. The opening of Lithuania to the West has led to political, economic and social changes which he has analysed from a subjective and contemporary point of view.

Writing about the past and the history of a country seems to depend largely on an unstable, complex “negotiation” between reality relying on facts, and fiction relying on dominant ideological and utopian trends, with both the individual and the group being involved. In his work, the artist highlights the difficulty of transmitting history. Taking his personal history as a starting point, he reactivates utopias and ideologies from the past, wishing to activate collective memory.

In the videos of Deimantas Narkevičius, the way the narrative belongs both to the past and the present is reaffirmed by the use of techniques and visual and sound codes from films and documentaries dating from the Soviet period. He mingles professional methods and an amateur style which place the videos into times and spaces that cannot be identified.

The unique architecture of MAGASIN, its industrial past, and its current location and surroundings were a major inspiration to Deimantas Narkevičius in choosing the works he would present, but above all in producing his new pieces. The title of his exhibition, “Da Capo”, refers not only to the musical motif, but also to a state of innocence and naivety, that indeterminate stage when everything is still possible before it becomes history. That relationship between innocence and history is central to the work of Deimantas Narkevičius: here history coincides with that of the socialist past, and of the more general failure of the modern Utopia.

Deimantas Narkevičius’s exhibition will bring together a selection of works – ones already in existence, and new pieces specially created for this exhibition. Specifically, he will present video works and installations along with two sound pieces.

The new video installation Books on Shelves and Without Letters has been co-produced specifically for the exhibition by MAGASIN with the collaboration of the Gallery Barbara Weiss (Berlin).